


Zero Hour

by riptheh



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, ITS WILD, Timey Wimey, WHACK story, idek how to explain?, time runs backwards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23097499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riptheh/pseuds/riptheh
Summary: The Doctor falls asleep, and falls out of the universe.Or, the Doctor searches for her memories, and finds them. Sort of.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & The Doctor's TARDIS
Comments: 19
Kudos: 60





	Zero Hour

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, I'm trying something new here. This fic is a bit of a hot mess (most of it was written in an airport), but I think it makes sense, maybe?

Revelations are in bad taste.

For a long time, she doesn’t believe it. It’s not her, no sir. Countless lives lived before her birth? Impossible. Ridiculous. She ignores it, and works on the TARDIS, and pretends that none of that happened. She doesn’t pick the fam up, and she’s not sure why. Maybe because there are revelations hiding behind her eyes, and they’ll pick up on them, clever perceptive humans, just like they picked up on her search for the Master, and besides, they’re all probably happier now. Back in the twenty first century, and safe. She relishes in that. Relief is like a press removed from her chest, left so long she hadn’t realized it was there.

They’re safe. She misses them terribly. But she doesn’t pick them up.

Instead, she searches. Without meaning to, without direction, without regard. She lies in bed and doesn’t sleep and wracks her brains trying to remember. She tracks the universe, almost absentmindedly, for a portal to another world. She pretends it’s just casual interest.

She needs to know.

The TARDIS beeps at her worriedly, and she ignores it, because Time Lords don’t need that much sleep, not like humans.

“Am I a Time Lord, even?” she asks the TARDIS, who only beeps. She doesn’t know how to answer, and neither does the Doctor.

“I went to the Academy.” She sounds the words out on her tongue, makes them real. “I grew up on Gallifrey. I had seven grandmothers. I remember that all. It happened.”

But where is the rest of her?

A childhood that doesn’t exist. A life—lives—that never happened. Do they even matter? The answer is no. The answer is yes. The answer is it’s eating her up from the inside, bit by bit, and she can’t sleep because she lies awake and thinks about it and then rolls over onto her stomach and presses her face into her pillow to choke down a lump in her throat, because it’s not fair. She only wants to mourn, but she can’t even do that properly anymore.

_Everything you know is a lie._

That’s not true, she thinks, then laughs a choking laugh that gets swallowed by her pillow, because how can everything she know be a lie if she doesn’t know anything anymore?

“Where is the rest of me?” she asks nobody at all, and nobody really answers—maybe there’s nobody left to—but the TARDIS beeps in sympathy and that’s comforting enough.

And in the meantime, when she’s awake, which is all the time, she searches. Tirelessly, desperately. For what, she’s not sure. But when she finds it, it’s entirely by accident.

And it happens because she falls asleep.

Falling asleep is a rarity, and an ill-desired luxury. She needs it—she longs for it. She can’t stand it for more than twenty minutes, and sometimes not even that. Twenty minutes is just about long enough for her brain to slip into REM sleep, and that’s when her subconscious digs its claws into her skin and tears her dreams apart, piece by piece. Gruesome, and entirely unpretty.

She avoids sleep whenever possible.

It comes this time entirely by accident, and she’s probably lucky she didn’t kill herself in the process. She’s propped precariously on a section of flooring that has been removed, her legs dangling into twelve feet of empty, under-the-flooring space, and she’s got a welding mask over her face. In her hands, she holds a plasma soldering gun, and with it, she’s fixing a circuit that really doesn’t need to be touched.

The TARDIS is not pleased. 

It’s not the TARDIS, however, who knocks her out, though she’d quite like to. Instead, it’s the Doctor’s own damned drowsiness, which sweeps over her with such comforting peril that she doesn’t even notice when her finger slides from the trigger of the soldering gun, and her metal-plated chin sinks to her chest.

She falls, in that way that people fall when they’re almost asleep and their brain decides to play tricks on them. She falls, and then jerks awake with a start.

She’s no longer in her TARDIS.

She’s no longer anywhere, actually. Her welding mask is gone, and so is her apron, and soldering gun—had she dropped it?—and she’s standing sock-footed on a ground that feels like it might not exist at all. It’s alive, in the most intangible sense, and it rushes beneath her feet like a river, though it doesn’t take her anywhere. It’s incredibly unnerving. 

The Doctor takes one breath, just to make sure she can—and sucks in nothing. Her lungs inflate, sure enough, and her hearts continue to thump, and she doesn’t feel like she’s strangling, but she doesn’t feel like she’s breathing either. She’s not sure she’s alive.

“What on _earth_ is—” she starts to say, but the sound carries like a rock. Falls from her lips, and splat! upon the ground. Nothing to travel through, maybe, though she’s certainly breathing something, but that’s probably enough mystery for the day. She’s not in the mood to explore. She’s definitely not in the mood to dream up strange worlds such as this, not when she has a bad soldering job to finish, but when she goes to pinch herself, it doesn’t hurt.

“You’re in the Zero Hour,” a voice says behind her, small and pale even in sound, and she spins around in a shock, her hearts leaping into her throat. She’s not sure why, but she hadn’t expected anybody else to be there. 

“Uh—okay.” It’s a child. The Doctor stares for a long moment, and then she jerks to life, questions falling from her lips, heedless and panicky, which is ridiculous, because she’s only staring down a child. A girl, specifically, small and dark skinned with her hair done up in intricate braids. “Where is this? Who are you? Am I dreaming?”

The girl considers this for a long moment, biting her lip. “I don’t _think_ I’m anybody.”

The Doctor looks at her for an even second, then slowly bends down and plants her hands on her knees. “I don’t think you’re nobody. You have to be somebody. I’m the Doctor, by the way.”

The girl studies her for several long seconds with large, solemn eyes. When she speaks, she shrugs diffidently, as if it doesn’t, indeed, matter whether she’s anybody at all. “Maybe. I’m not saying that. I’m not saying anything. I’m really not anybody here.”

“Uh—” The Doctor can only nod at this, unsure what to say. She straightens slowly, still nodding, and looks around. It’s oddly clammy, and she winces with the chill, palms her forehead. “Oh, for Rassilon’s—I don’t know what, but—this _has_ to be a dream.”  
  
“A dream of what?” The girl tilts her head. There’s something about it that unnerves the Doctor. She glances around, squinting, and all of a sudden realizes that it’s dark, impossibly so. What had it been a moment before? Nothing, nothing at all, or at least nothing her brain had registered. She looks around wildly, sudden panic rising in her chest.

“I don’t—I think—” She hates the dark, she hates it— “This has to be a dream.”

“Um—” The girl purses her lips, clearly confused. It’s obvious she has no more idea what’s happening than the Doctor does. “Do you think you’re dreaming?” 

“I don’t—” The Doctor stares at her. The dark is creeping in, enclosing upon her. The ground is rushing beneath her feet. Something is off here, she realizes. Around her, things are still and muddy. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know.” The girl’s lips tug into a woeful frown, as if she wants to help the Doctor, but has no idea how. The Doctor stares at her, hearts pounding. It’s all off, all of it. Time is completely still here. No—no it’s not. It’s running the wrong way, not forward like it’s supposed to, but— 

“Is time running backwards here? Are we having this conversation backwards?”

The girl tilts her head, confused. She bites her lip, clearly at a loss, but the Doctor is too busy thinking back, trying to parse the entire conversation. Run it backwards in her head, figure out where it started and how it started, and once she hits upon it, she realizes that she’s right. 

“Table duet,” she whispers, and the girl opens her mouth to respond, but whatever she’s about to say, the Doctor doesn’t hear it. The darkness around her retreats as suddenly as it descended, dissolving into white nothingness, and when the Doctor takes a step back in surprise, her socked foot slips right through the moving river of ground and whisks her away.

She wakes up mid-fall, and barely has time to fling her arms forward in a last attempt to break it before she crashes into a particularly painful bit of machinery below the flooring.

Below the flooring. Right. She groans and rolls onto her back, her welding mask fogging up with her breath, and stares at the muddy orange light far above. She’d opened the flooring to do repairs. She’d been sitting right on the edge, working on that damned circuit, when she must have nodded off and pitched right over. Around her, the TARDIS hums in laughter.

“Shut up,” she grumbles, and swats irritatedly—achingly—at a bit of machinery, which sparks in response. “That hurt.”

But at the very least, she thinks grimly as she clambers to her feet, and hauls herself out of the flooring, she’s now the farthest thing from sleepy.

————

She doesn’t sleep for five more days. Instead, she hunts.

Zero Hour, Zero Hour, Zero Hour. She scours planets and galaxies and the biggest libraries in the universe, and finds nothing but legends. Half told, none of them making any sense.

Time runs backwards, one says.

The Zero Hour doesn’t exist at all, says another.

The only way to get there is by plugging your ears and sneezing precisely at midnight, says yet a third, and she knows that of all things, that’s probably not true.

Still, she tries it and gets nowhere, mainly because she can’t make herself sneeze on command. And in the meantime, the TARDIS drifts and worries and tries to get her to nod off, and she does at one point, but even that doesn’t help. She only has a nightmare, one of those horrible recent ones where the Master miniaturizes all her friends and she tries to undo it all but he just laughs in her face and then, inexplicably, serves her pecan pie.

She hates pecan pie. 

So sleep doesn’t help. It has to be something else, something utterly coincidental and probably logical in a way she’s not seeing. Something that would only make sense in a dream.

It takes her five days to figure it out. Then, of course, she has to try it.

“Oh!” She sits straight up underneath the console, and immediately smacks her head on the underside. “Ow!”

Around her, the TARDIS laughs. She doesn’t deign this with a response. She’s been rather rude these days, a poking and prodding and teasing that the Doctor knows is really disguised worry, but she can’t be bothered to respond to it, not when she’s on the verge of discovery. Well, been on the verge of discovery. For the past five days.

“I’ve got it!” she says instead, and clambers out from the underside of the console, wincing slightly as her head gives an accompanying throb. “Ooh—okay, still hurts.”

The TARDIS beeps, a question swirling around her, but she takes a moment to answer, straightening up and palming her head. “The Zero Hour. I’ve figured it out.”

The TARDIS hums in disapproval, which only draws a glare from the Doctor. “No, it’s not a dream! And I know you don’t approve. I don’t care. This is important. There’s—“ She stops, and shakes her head. “That girl. That place. There’s something about it.”

The TARDIS can only hum her ire, which the Doctor shakes off easily. She’s used to doing so. In the end, the TARDIS can’t really stop her. Distract her, maybe. But not from this.

With a sigh, she turns to prop herself against the controls, thinking. 

None of the sources she’d found had mentioned a girl. Only the Zero Hour, a place that doesn’t exist at all, a place where time runs backwards, a place where the start of a conversation is the finish. Complicated, the Doctor thinks grimly. She’s used to thinking backward and forward, but this is a bit much, even for her.

“Who is she?” she wonders out loud. “And why is she there?”

And how does she get there again? She has an idea, sure, but it’s like the sneezing thing—she doesn’t think she can do it on command. 

Or maybe she can.

She ignores the TARDIS’s hum of dismay to spin around and lunge for the flooring, now safely back in place. She’d stayed away from precarious fix jobs since her last fall, but now she thinks she’s been treading down the wrong path. Maybe, she thinks as she shoves a large floor panel aside, revealing the dark space beneath, a little vertigo is exactly what she needs.

The TARDIS beeps in distress, but she shoos her off as she swings her legs over the empty space, then settles, shoulders sagging, and waits. Nothing happens.

Well, not yet. Because it takes a second to fall asleep, doesn’t it? She squeezes her eyes shut, allows her legs to kick idly over the side, and surrenders herself to the drowsiness that is her constant companion. The exhaustion, which she can never manage to get rid of in twenty minute snatches of sleep, which should be enough, all things considering. She’s a Time Lord, for Rassilon’s sake. Or, she thought she was. Maybe she’s nobody at all. Maybe she’s just a lost soul, wondering the universe, not even a denizen of this universe, but somebody else entirely. 

Not even anybody. Not even...

Her eyes are drooping, her breathing slowing, and when she finally tips forward, she barely even feels the fall.

She wakes in the Zero Hour.

Or at least, she thinks it’s the Zero Hour. It certainly feels like it, in the sense that nothing can feel like anything. When she turns slowly, her vision swims between darkness and absolute nonexistence, like her brain is trying very hard to process something that isn’t there at all.

She’s alone. Or so she feels. Silence cottons her ears, fills her nose and mouth and muffles her breathing. The ground rushes beneath her feet, only now, she realizes, it’s rushing backward.

Everything, backward. What the hell, she wonders, could this place possibly be?

“Doctor.” A small voice cuts through the silence, impossibly young and yet very, very old. “It’s you.”

“Oh—“ Slowly, the Doctor turns. And sure enough, there she is. The girl, achingly familiar and yet not at all. “It’s you. Not anybody.”

The girl nods, solemn as a monk. “Yes. You remembered, right? Who I am.”

No. Yes. The truth is, she has no clue, but there’s a sneaking suspicion crawling up her back, and she’s not sure she wants to contemplate it. She nods anyway. “Yes, I got it. I think I’m getting it.” When the girl doesn’t answer, the Doctor turns around slowly, squinting, trying to make out the rest of the place. Just to confirm, she says it out loud, making it real. “We’re in the Zero Hour.”

_Found_. Her experiment, a success. And it’d only taken her five days.

The girl nods. “Time moves backwards here.” When the Doctor turns back to face her, the girl studies her, eyes large. “Are you sure you understand?”

“Yeah. I just—“ No. What did she need to remember? What is she missing right now? “These conversations—” she grimaces. She hates a head wonk. “They happen backwards, don’t they?”

The girl shrugs. “Is it different out there?”

The Doctor nods, and the girl tilts her head, inquisitive. “Yeah, but—this is _different_. Time—this place—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The girl shrugs again. “It’s the Zero Hour.”

“Yes, _okay_.” They’re going around in circles, she thinks. Her head is starting to hurt. “This place. But what is the Zero Hour?”

It’s not a question she should have asked, she can tell immediately. The girl steps back, far enough the darkness starts to enclose her. Her eyes are wide, frightened.

“My place,” she whispers. “I’m kept here. Me. Not anybody.”

“Your place?” Alarm flares through the Doctor. She steps forward, but the girl only shakes her head, freezing her. “Who are you?”

The girl bites her lip. She’s toeing one foot into the ground, the Doctor notices suddenly, which is funny because she can’t see the ground. “You already know, anyway. My name. Who I am. They put me here, because I came from here. They said it’s my place. Once I was done.”

The Doctor stares at her in disbelief. “And you were just—dumped here? And you can’t tell me anything?” Childish irritation sparks in her chest. “I have to figure it out on my own?”

“Yes.”

“So should I think backwards? Like you?”

The girl smiles, and it’s almost creepy, but there’s something sad about it instead. “I dunno. Maybe I’m meant to be backwards. Maybe you aren’t. Or maybe you are.”

“But—” And _snap_ , it hits her like a rubber band. She steps back, sudden panic rising in her. Fear, at the very thing she’d known from the start of the conversation, the very thing she had to look for, but she asks anyway, because she has to. “Are you trapped here? Are you—”

_Me_. She doesn’t say it out loud, but the world swirls around her, and it occurs to the Doctor that she can only stay a short time, because she has to stop falling sometime. Before the world can disappear entirely, however, she lunges forward and grasps the girl’s hand.

“Let me help you.”

But the girl only shakes her head and jerks her hand from the Doctor’s grip, leaving a flash of what has to be fire in her wake, but the Doctor doesn’t even have time to yelp in pain before the world dissolves around her and she disappears.

She wakes up when she hits the ground, and it’s every bit as painful as the fall before. This time, the TARDIS only moans.

“Sorry, old girl,” the Doctor murmurs, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t even attempt to look at her hand, not at first. She only stares at the ceiling, far above her, and then slowly shuts her eyes. She has the strangest urge to cry.

It occurs to her for the first time that maybe she doesn’t want to find whatever she’s looking for.

—————

She keeps looking anyway. She can’t help it—she’s obsessed. For all she knows, the girl and the Zero Hour might be exactly the clue she’s looking for.

That is, if they’re real at all.

She’s not entirely sure they are. When she examines her palm, she finds only a faint redness, which quickly fades, leaving nothing but a memory and a sense of frustration she can’t ignore.

A dream, or a clue? She oscillates between the two in her mind, and in the meantime, with nothing to do despite the TARDIS’s urgings to _please go pick up her friends,_ she does research.

The Zero Hour. Dreams. Hallucinations. The connection between the subconscious mind and other worlds, if such a thing exists. She burns through books and papers and databases until her eyes turn red, but she doesn’t sleep. Not yet. Not until she’s ready.

She has to understand.

Memories taunt her, or rather, the lack of them. Funny—she’s never been one to miss what she doesn’t have. Now, she can’t stand it. When she does occasionally doze off—not in the right way, not in the way that sends her falling—she dreams of the girl and her solemn eyes, her uncertainty which grows with each passing moment. There’s something troubling the girl, the Doctor thinks every time she wakes, and it’s up to the Doctor to find out what.

She had once told Amy that she only interferes when there are crying children. She didn’t refute it then. She doesn’t now.

Even if the crying child may be herself.

(Even if the crying child doesn’t exist at all.)

According to the universe at large, the Zero Hour exists in nothing but myth, if even that. Oh, it’s referenced occasionally, always offhand and never with an accompanying definition, and from what she can gather, it’s the only place in the universe that doesn’t have a physical concept. It’s more of a metaphysical plane, or perhaps a dream state, or some kind of hidden timeline, or maybe—or maybe—

Eventually, the Doctor decides that the only thing she can do is ask the source herself.

This time around, it takes even less time to set up. She’s running on fumes at this point, red-eyed and exhausted, so when she pushes away the panel and balances on the edge, she doesn’t expect unconsciousness to take her in more than a minute.

It takes her five seconds.

She tilts forward, and falls, and lands feet first like a cat. When she straightens, she sees that she’s made it; she’s surrounded by nothing-darkness, and the ground beneath her feet moves and swirls and threatens to drag her away.

Falling, she thinks. Still falling. She won’t have much time until she lands.

“You.”

“Me?” The Doctor turns around slowly, and when she spots the girl, gives her a reassuring grin, hoping to cut the tension that seems to hang in the air around them, curdling like old milk. It doesn’t work; the moment their eyes meet, the girl steps back, her face pinched in fright.

“You’re making this place worse.”

The Doctor’s grin slides from her face like snow smacked against a window.

“What?”

The girl presses her lips flat, and shakes her head. She’s trembling, the Doctor notices, in the tips of her fingers. Around them, the air thickens. “No. You have to leave.”

“Listen—” The Doctor scrambles. This isn’t what she expected. Then again, she’s not sure what she expected. “Somebody wanted me here. I found you.”

“I don’t—“

“I’ve been researching too.” She doesn’t like the atmosphere here. There’s something malicious in the air, something scooping a barrier between her and the girl. The ground tugs at her feet; any moment, it’ll through her out.

But at her words the girl pauses. “Really?”

“Yes!” the Doctor exclaims. Then she frowns, and turns a slow circle, examining the darkness. Something is different this time. There’s a smell now, of musty damp and formaldehyde. “Uh…but according to what I found the Zero Hour isn’t real. In the normal sense. I don’t know what that means.”

Behind her, the girl huffs, and it’s so utterly normal that the Doctor almost cries out in relief. Childish petulance, she can take any day of the week. “The Zero Hour is real. It’s just an extra hour. When they were done with me, they put me here, so I wouldn’t exist anymore.”

“I know.” Slowly, the Doctor turns back to face her. She studies the girl, her expression grave, and her hands shoved into her pockets. “And I’m starting to think you’re right. The Zero Hour doesn’t exist. And you aren’t real either.”

The girl bits her lip, distressed. “I don’t know what I am.”

The Doctor nods, but she’s not looking at the girl anymore. She stares past her shoulder, into the darkness. No—it’s not darkness. It’s solidifying, turning rank, turning—

“I think you might be my memories.”

“What?” The girl stares at her, baffled. For a moment, the Doctor doesn’t answer. Then her eyes move back to the girl’s face, and she studies it, searching. Trying to understand, and quickly, because she can feel her time running out, the moist of it is creeping up her spine, under her clothes. It’s like she’s stuck in a pool of rot, but there’s no water to be found. Only the ground coursing under her feet.

“I think I have to help you,” she says. She expects, at least, a hint of relief. But the girl only draws back, suddenly apprehensive.

“I don’t know if that’s possible.” She chooses her words carefully, like she’s playing at being a grown-up. But the Doctor only shakes her head and steps closer.

“Something has gone wrong here.” She reaches out, palm up, her hand beckoning. Come with me. “Do you—do you know what’s happening? Is this place degrading?”

“I don’t know.” The girl doesn’t take her hand. She stares at it, then takes a step back. The Doctor takes a step forward, determined. The smell of damp is so thick in her nose she’s choking on it. She speaks through her teeth.

“Are we safe here?” The answer is no, it feels like, but the girl doesn’t seem to care. She won’t take her hand and she won’t step forward, and when the Doctor tries to close the gap the ground winds up around her ankles and pulls her back. She stumbles, falling, but before she can hit the ground, the darkness around her disappears. White nothingness takes its place.

No—not nothing. She hits the ground with a thump, just as the world flashes around her, illuminated like the flash of a camera in a dark room, and in that moment, the Doctor sees.

The world is peeling, flaking, moldy as an underground basement left to rot. It stinks to high heaven, enough to make her gag, and before her the girl—the girl—

The girl is dead. Nothing more than a body, swollen tongue and bulging eyes, with waxy, flaking skin and hair halfway out of her head, and yet still she stares at the Doctor, her gaze the only thing alive about her, and in the instant before the ground wraps around the Doctor and pulls her down again, she looks _afraid_.

“Wai—” the Doctor tries to call out, but she never gets the words past her throat. In an instant the illumination is gone and solid darkness sweeps into her mouth, her ears, her nose and eyes, dank and disgusting and smelling of mold, but before she can even choke on it, she’s gone.

It’s more painful the third time, because she falls right into the circuitry.

“OW!” she cries, and this time the TARDIS laughs, but it’s a bitter sort of laughter, the kind that comes from being helpless to do anything else, and the Doctor doesn’t rebuke her. Instead she groans, then shifts, and tries to gather her thoughts.

The place is dead. No—the place is dying, and the girl in it, and no wonder she’s scared, because there’s nobody to get her out.

Nobody except the Doctor.

“I have to get her out.” The Doctor scrambles to a sitting position, though it’s less of a scramble and more of an aching heave—falling _hurts_ —then clambers to her feet. “I have—I have to—”

The TARDIS beeps, and it might be worry but it might also be a warning. It doesn’t matter; the Doctor doesn’t listen. She heaves herself out of the flooring, then swings around and plants herself on the edge again.

The smell of rot and formaldehyde is still in her nostrils, and her nose itches for it. She wants to sneeze, but suppresses the urge. Instead, she squeezes her eyes shut and leans forward slightly, just to make sure she’ll really fall when she dozes off.

Except she doesn’t doze off. She stays that way for a good five minutes, or possibly ten, eyes forced shut, teeth gritted and jaw clenched, willing herself to submit to unconsciousness. 

Nothing happens. Instead, her body aches and her hearts pound and her mind races with low-level panic because the girl is alone and _scared_ and if she’s just sitting here—if she’s just sitting here—

“Damn it!” Her fist comes down onto the edge of the flooring panel, and pain bursts through her knuckles. She sucks in a breath and bites her tongue for it, then, waving it out, clambers to her feet and spins around.

“I have to find her,” she says to the TARDIS. The TARDIS makes a noise that sounds very much like _no_ , to which the Doctor only shoots the console a glare.

“Shut up.” She lurches forward and types in coordinates, then erases those and types in different coordinates, then gets rid of those as well and types in another set, then again, and again— “I have to find her, you didn’t see her like I did, you don’t understand—”

The TARDIS hums a contrary opinion, and without thinking, the heel of the Doctor’s palm slams against the console.

“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!”

Silence. Even the hum has cut short. The TARDIS isn’t gone—the Doctor can still feel her mental presence around her—but she’s gone quiet, cowed by the show of temper.

The Doctor closes her eyes slowly, and lets out a breath. Then she steps back from the console, and cradles her injured hand in the other.

“I’m sorry.”

The TARDIS hums sulkily. The console lights up rather rudely, but she doesn’t admonish.

“I need to find her.”

Again, the TARDIS hums a question. _Why?_

“Because—” The Doctor huffs out a sigh, then winces as pain throbs dully through her hand. Her noise is still tickling, but she can’t itch it. “She’s me. She has to be. It all—nobody but the Time Lords could create an extra hour within the universe. She might be the person I was before they—before they got rid of it all.”

She pauses, and silence hangs between them. The Doctor looks up at the console, the lights now a soothing, sympathetic blue, and bites her lip.

“She’s dying. I think she’s dying.”

At this, the TARDIS gives a long, undulating sigh, and the Doctor feels all the fight go out of her. She almost sags with relief, except then the TARDIS plants another, more immediate thought in her mind.

_I don’t know how to help you._

“Huh?” The Doctor looks up, then grimaces. “Right—right. How do I get to the Zero Hour? She turns around and begins to pace, trying to think. Desperation gnaws at her heels, nips at the hem of her coat, and she wonders worriedly just how much time might be passing in the Zero Hour right now. Is it too late? Is the place dissolving as she speaks?

“I can’t fall asleep, can I?” She swirls around and plants her feet, facing the console. Rot twitches at her nose, nags at her senses. In response, the TARDIS beeps despondently. “And I don’t know how else to get there. Nothing else worked. Not even the stupid—the stupid—ah—ah—”

Itchiness wells up in her nose at the same moment that realization hits. The Doctor freezes, then lunges for the console.

“Jump ahead to midnight!”

The TARDIS, to her credit, responds quickly for a time machine. The controls whir, the main column slides up and down, and in the exact moment that the itchiness wells up and overwhelms, they arrive.

“Ah—ah—” Quickly, before it’s too late, the Doctor shoves her fingers in her ears. “ _Achoo!”_

Her ears pop, the world lurches, and when the Doctor opens her eyes, she’s in the Zero Hour.

This time, the world is illuminated, and it stays that way. Around her, the air flakes and falls away to reveal patches of—well, she’s not sure what. It’s lit in a ghostly, camera-flash fashion, and as the Doctor turns to examine the mildew, she can’t help but think that this is what the pipe system of the universe might look like.

Then, behind her comes a small cry, and the Doctor turns.

The girl stands there, dead—dying—and utterly terrified. She regards the Doctor with wide eyes, shifting nervously on both feet, and bites her lip. They’re cracked and bloody, the Doctor notes, though all the blood is dried.

“Listen—” The Doctor steps forward, hands out to reassure. “I think I need to get you out of here. You need to come with me.”

The girl shakes her head. Her teeth cuts into her lip. No blood wells up. “I don’t think I can.”

“Can too,” the Doctor replies, overly bright, but when the girl doesn’t reply, she sighs and bends down, pressing her hands to her knees. “I swear you can trust me.”

“I can’t.”

“Stop saying that.” It slips out without thinking, and surprises even the Doctor. She’s good with kids. Even when she’s socially awkward, even when she’s rude—she knows how to talk to children. Quickly, she backtracks and tries again. “Listen—we both know the truth. They left you here because you’re me. You _have_ to be.”

“No.” The girl shakes her head and takes a step back, eying her. “I’m not anybody.”

“Why?” The Doctor straightens, and steps forward, hand out. “Says who? Listen—I think _I’m_ here for a reason. For you.”

“No—it—I can’t—” She shakes her head. Tears are glistening in her eyes, tears of fright. The Doctor can’t blame her. “ _You_ have to go.”

“No.” She reaches out again, but the girl sidesteps her easily.

“I need to go—“ she spins around, but the Doctor lunges forward and manages to snag her by the hem of her shirt. It’s long, she notices suddenly, like those she had worn in childhood. Had it always resembled Gallifreyan clothing? Or had she just now noticed?

“It’s okay. It’s okay!” she reassures, her fingers clamped firmly around the fabric. Reluctantly, the girl turns. “You can stay.”

“I shouldn’t be here with you,” the girl whispers, eyes wide.

“Why?” The Doctor crouches down, but the girl only shies away, nervous. “Is something…not okay?”

“You shouldn’t be here.” She swings her head back and forth, wide and loose and desperate. Her lip trembles. “You just shouldn’t.”

“Why?”

But she’s crying now, silent tears streaming down her cheeks, and the Doctor doesn’t understand. “No. You’re wrong. I don’t want you here.”

“I know,” the Doctor assures her, even as her head spins, because she’s missing something, she’s _missing something_ — “But I think I’ll be able to help.”

“You’re not doing any good.”

“I will soon,” the Doctor replies. Around them, the scent of formaldehyde is getting stronger, the world brighter, the ground rushing beneath her feet with ever-increasing speed. She has the funny feeling that the air is closing around her, locking her in. “Listen—I promise. I just have to figure out why I’m needed here.”

The girl hesitates. Her eyes are wide, not quite trusting. Unsure, and there’s something about that that sets off alarm bells in the Doctor’s head, but the world around them is closing in and she can’t help the desperate feeling that she has to get out now, or she won’t be leaving at all. 

“Then...you’ll help me?”

The Doctor studies the girl, lips pressed flat, and doesn’t immediately respond. Something is wrong here, she thinks, but she can’t cipher it, and she can feel the pressure of destruction at the base of her skull. This world is not going to last, she thinks, and if she’s going to leave, she’s not going to leave empty-handed.

Not when she has herself to save.

“First,” she says, “I think I have to help myself.” She straightens, then reaches for the girl’s hand. 

The girl jerks away from her, but it’s too late. The world around them screeches and tears and collapses, and the girl screams, but the Doctor grabs her hand and holds on tight, then closes her eyes and sneezes.

Burning. That’s the first thing she registers. Her hand burns like nothing she’s ever felt, like it’s lit, personally, on fire, and she yanks it away from the offending source immediately, then recalls exactly what that source is.

The girl. The burn when they touched. The Doctor jerks into a sitting position, a cry for the girl on her lips, only to pause.

They’re not in the Zero Hour. They’re not in the nothing that collapsed around them in those final moments. They’re in the TARDIS console room, and the TARDIS is humming a nervous, discordant tune, and it takes a second for the Doctor to realize why.

The girl is beside her. Curled into a ball, shaking, her hands over her head. The Doctor stares, and stares, and thinks that she should probably feel a flush of success, except that it’s very obvious that something is very wrong.

“Hello—?” She reaches out tentatively, as if to lay a hand, but the girl jerks away, and her hand hovers, then draws back. “Are you okay?”

The girl shakes her head, then heaves a wretched sob, her shoulders shaking.

“Can’t be here.” Her words come muffled and coated with tears, but the Doctor hears them all the same, and her blood runs cold. “I can’t—not safe—”

“What’s not safe?” the Doctor asks, only she has the sinking feeling she knows the answer. And as if that isn’t enough proof, she sees it when she leans in closer, and feels her hearts sink.

The girl is no longer dead. She’s definitely not alive either. She’s fading right through, like cloth left out in the sun, colorless and drab, and the Doctor can do nothing but watch. Watch, and wonder if this was her fault.

“Did I do this?” she asks. For a moment, there’s only quiet. Then the girl nods, slowly, and the Doctor’s hearts run cold.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and doesn’t know what else to do, so she takes her coat off and throws it over the girl. It doesn’t seem to do much, but after a moment the girl shudders and pulls it tight against herself, and the Doctor sags in relief.

“I thought—” She doesn’t know what she thought. She didn’t think at all. All she remembers is desperation and certainty, goaded on by the anxious, wretched need—

“I killed the Zero Hour, didn’t I?” she asks, and watches the girl’s head move slowly up and down. “My presence somehow—it must have interacted in a way that made it unstable. Because I’m alive, and the Zero Hour—”

“Doesn’t exist,” the girl whispers. Her eyes are wide, and unseeing. Tear streaks mark her cheeks, and every third second or so, she sniffles. “I only exist backwards. I can’t exist forward.”

“Why not?” the Doctor asks, a desperate plea edging into her tone. “I mean—you said they put you there. You _came_ from this universe. You have to—”

But the girl only shakes her head and whines, ducking her chin deeper into the Doctor’s coat. “Not safe,” she whimpers. “They kept me there to keep me safe. Said they had to make me new, but they couldn’t—”

“They couldn’t get rid of you entirely,” the Doctor realizes. “Oh. _Oh_. It was too much for them, wasn’t it? The Time Lords, or whoever. You—” she reaches out, pokes the girl gently on the shoulder— “You’re made of memory, you have to be. And the Zero Hour was like—like a flash drive, outside the universe. An extra hour, so slick that nobody could find it, all to house the lives of—”

She trails off, trembling, though she doesn’t know why. The girl is trembling too, shaking like a leaf, and she can’t help but feel like she’s not long for this world.

And it’s all her fault.

“Are you me?” she asks for what might be the dozenth time. And of course, the girl only shakes her head.

“I’m not anybody,” she whispers. And this time, the Doctor realizes why.

“You’re not anybody,” she repeats, and understanding fills her brain. Her chest aches. “Of course. You aren’t anybody. You’re—you’re an amalgamation of memories that somebody stored, so they could—so they could get them back someday. So they could…give…them back.”

Her head is starting to spin, her chest aching like she might cry, and she’s starting to realize why. Because her past isn’t lost to her, if this even is her past. Her past has been stored outside the universe, waiting for the Time Lords to pick it up and restore it once more, only they never got the chance, because they were destroyed. And then the Doctor had to go and fall into it by accident, and so desperate was she to find what she’d lost, that she wiped the hard drive completely.

“You’re not me,” she whispers, and she knows this time that she’s right. “You’re a stored version of my past. You were waiting for me, only I don’t—I don’t know how to restore you. Nobody does, anymore. The Time Lords are gone.”

The girl shudders and cries, low and afraid. “They put me there to keep me safe,” she says. “They—I don’t know where I am anymore.”

“I know, I know.” The Doctor inches closer and, because it’s the least she can do, reaches out and works her arms under the girl, cradling her to her chest. The girl doesn’t protest—she might not even feel it. But she does let her head fall against the Doctor’s shoulder, and she lays there quietly, sniffling and shuddering and soon, the Doctor knows, fading. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I wanted you back so bad. I wanted you back more than anything.”

But maybe, she thinks as she says this, it wasn’t meant to be in the first place. After all, if her own presence had been enough to destroy the flash drive, then maybe it was a matter of incompatibility. Old software, trying to download on a shiny new operating system.

Maybe, the Doctor thinks, some things just aren’t meant to be. Then, she thinks, though she doesn’t really feel it—maybe this is for the better.

The girl fades like a ghost, slowly and quietly, and the Doctor holds her the entire time. Clutches her to her chest and lets her tremble and cry, and doesn’t ask her any more questions. It’s not worth it she decides. And then—she doesn’t deserve it. After all, she’s gotten this far, a sturdy little bundle of memories, surviving all this time. She deserves, the Doctor thinks, a quiet death.

It takes some time before she’s gone completely. When she does disappear, fading like a wisp on the wind, the Doctor sits there for a very long time, motionless, the knuckles of her hand still throbbing, then climbs unsteadily to her feet and turns to the console.

“You were right,” she tells the TARDIS, and the TARDIS doesn’t reply. She doesn’t need to. She only dims the lights, and the Doctor knows what she’s saying.

_I’m sorry._

“It’s okay,” the Doctor says, sniffling slightly, and they both know that it’s not, but neither of them say it. Instead, the Doctor only steps up to the controls, and brushes her fingers over the buttons. She doesn’t know what to do now.

“Where should I go?” she asks, and is surprised when the TARDIS laughs. She balks, insulted, but only for a moment, because then the TARDIS puts in answer in her head, and she knows it’s the right one.

“Alright.” The Doctor sighs, and sags against the console. “No, yeah. It’s about time I stop obsessing over memories, huh?”

The TARDIS beeps delightedly in response, and the Doctor laughs. It’s a tear stained laugh, but it’s a laugh all the same.

“Alright, love. Go ahead. Set course for Sheffield.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't already guessed, if you read back the dialogue in the conversations that happen in the Zero Hour, you should get another conversation. AKA, the conversations are meant to be read backwards and forwards, with the beginning of the conversation the ending revelation of....the conversation. if that makes sense. IDK, I tried to do something a little different. Also, this idea is WHACK and I apologize.


End file.
